Matt Mahan Leans on Private Sector To Spur Building

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan used a downtown Los Angeles town hall dedicated to “revitalization” to list addressing homelessness and giving developers more incentives on residential projects as priorities as he makes a run for governor.

A critic of what he called “performative politics,” Mahan said his slogan, “get California back to basics,” means identifying priorities and creating sequential action to tackle the most important issues first. In his case, that’s getting people off the streets – a critical concern for downtown L.A. stakeholders, as the area’s vibrancy has dulled in recent years due to perceptions around safety and cleanliness.

The Democrat, who described himself as “radically pragmatic” and an “urbanist” at the Saturday event, drew parallels between San Jose’s downtown and Los Angeles’s. Pre-pandemic, both areas were seeing positive movement through new developments and revitalization efforts; however, Covid-19 and its aftermath ushered in a new age of disarray.

It’s no secret that downtown L.A. has been especially slow to recover. As of the fourth quarter, downtown’s office vacancy stood at 31.7 percent compared to 24.8 percent in L.A. County overall, Colliers reported.

“If you don’t feel safe, it’s really hard to get people to spend time walking around or to operate a business… when people are literally stepping over human beings who are suffering laying on the sidewalk,” Mahan said.

To get people sheltered quickly, he said the state has to stop “funding failure,” pointing to permanent supportive housing projects that pencil out to close to $1 million per unit and take six or seven years to come to fruition.

The L.A. area is no stranger to such developments. A recently completed affordable housing project in West Hollywood ended up costing more than $850,000 per unit and was funded in part by the state’s Local Housing Trust Fund program and the state’s Department of Developmental Services. California also partially funded the Weingart Tower, a permanent supportive housing complex in downtown L.A. which opened last year and totaled close to $600,000 per unit.

Mahan said he’d like to move away from costly developments and replicate some of the strategies he’s implemented in San Jose on a statewide level. This includes creating prefabricated, standalone modular units developed on government-owned land.

Another initiative has been purchasing old motels and converting them to transitional housing. While housing units are still at a shortage, Mahan has also created “safe parking sites” and “safe sleeping sites” for homeless individuals to reside in an effort to keep them off the streets.

Los Angeles too has been employing these strategies which appears to be paying off to some degree, with unsheltered homelessness decreasing by 17.5 percent from 2022 to 2025.

Where Mahan goes a step further is his view on intervention. A supporter of Prop 36 – the Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act – Mahan made clear he was not against mandatory detoxes for those who refuse shelter services.

“I don’t find it progressive or compassionate to allow people to choose to be outside and to die,” Mahan said. “We acknowledge the reality of our well-intended desire to protect civil liberties and freedom, but we’ve also over the last decade let nearly 50,000 people die out of our streets in California.”

Mahan’s ideas about getting people off the streets seemed to appeal to attendees of the gubernatorial hopeful’s local town hall, as the roughly 60 Angelenos present cheered at the promise of a more hands-on approach.

Homelessness aside, Mahan also stressed the need for housing to be affordable for working families.

“The market can’t provide affordable housing if it can’t build housing affordably,” Mahan said in an interview with The Real Deal. “The only way to (build high quantities of housing) sustainably and at scale is to remove barriers and incentivize the private sector to build.”

Given the private sector’s ability to create housing more quickly and more cost effectively, Mahan thinks the public sector should focus more on acquiring existing housing and designating it as affordable, while making it easier for private developers to build new product.

To that end, Mahan vowed to “(prevent) local governments from imposing exorbitant sales or transfer taxes on new infill housing, like L.A.’s Measure ULA,” he said on his website.

Requiring local governments to issue permit approvals for conforming projects faster, capping local impact fees, simplifying the building code and further streamlining CEQA are additional priorities for bolstering housing production. He also stressed that he would not be afraid to employ veto power, if elected, to block legislation that would increase regulatory burdens on building.

Some of Los Angeles’s biggest real estate names have taken an interest in Mahan, TRD reported. Victor Coleman of Hudson Pacific Properties, Douglas Emmett’s chairman and CEO Jordan Kaplan, “Selling Sunset” star Jason Oppenheim and billionaire developer Rick Caruso all have donated $78,400 to the San Jose mayor’s campaign – the maximum allowed for an individual donor.

While Mahan said he was hesitant to speculate on behalf of these donors, broadly speaking, he sees his campaign resonating with those who “are frustrated with good intentions that don’t translate into real world impact” in government.

“People who are in the industry understand the economics of home building and the many ways that the public sector often unintentionally drives up the cost of building housing,” Mahan said.